5 ms·

"narco-trafficking boats" There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's

by davidw 11mo ago

"narco-trafficking boats" There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.

wetpaws 11mo ago
[dead]
voganmother42 11mo ago
The US gov cartel is ruthless - military members get to be murderers, but its good preparation for when they are deployed against US cities
somenameforme 11mo ago
100% agreed with this and this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.' All of this really sounds so much better than what it really is. It's murdering people all around the world, many of whom are 100% innocent. For instance the last person we droned in occupied Afghanistan was Zemari Ahmadi - a longtime worker for a US humanitarian aid organization. A US drone operator mistook bottles of water he was loading into his car for his family as bombs, and so they murdered him as well as 10 other civilians, including 7 children, all with the press of a button. [1] [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-drone-kabul-afghanistan-isis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-...
- jmb99 11mo ago
  >many of whom are 100% innocent Under US law, 100% of them are 100% innocent, by definition. "Innocent until proven guilty" and whatnot; it literally means that every person is innocent in the eyes of the law until a court finds them guilty.
  - PenguinCoder 11mo ago
    Unfortunately that had been forgotten in this era.
  - anarticle 11mo ago
    Fun fact, if you're not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply. I'm not saying this because I'm taking a side, but this was how the Patriot act had knock on effects. An interesting case of this is something like you call a foreign national in another country and this is enough to be able to tap both sides of the conversation via Patriot Act / NSA purview.
    - asdefghyk 11mo ago
      RE ".....not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply....." Does not maKE SENSE... Why are people extradited to US from overseas locations . Like why they want Julian Assange ?
      - raspasov 11mo ago
        Just some ideas: - Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media - He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy) - He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise. For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
      - bulbar 11mo ago
        It does not apply in general, but a country will always declare jurisdiction if deemed necessary. A common example in Germany is that the country will try to enforce German law for foreign-hosted websites hosted by citizen of another country if the website is targeted at German citizen.
    - 11mo ago
- owlbite 11mo ago
  But it can be even worse than that. It's "we assassinated the phone", "algorithm says vehicle has suspicious travel history and must die". There's no real thinking human in the loop for some of this stuff, just some model decided the metadata has a high probability of being associate with an opponent of some flavor and then everyone in the vicinity is blown to bits as computer said kill.
- mmooss 11mo ago
  > this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.' The US administration uses the long range to argue that the War Powers Act doesn't apply: They aruge that the Act applies to 'hostilities', and US soldiers are too far from the targets to be exposed to danger, therefore they aren't 'hostilities'.
  - lupire 11mo ago
    And that reasoning was plagiarized from Obama's justification for operations in Libya.
    - mmooss 11mo ago
      Was it? And so what?
- hpdigidrifter 11mo ago
  >100% innocent Feel free to explain the submarine with no flag they bombed
  - vincnetas 11mo ago
    i have not seen any submarines with flags though.
    - dmoy 11mo ago
      I think GP means flag as in flag state - ocean vessels are typically to some country. In this sense, nearly all submarines are flagged - US navy, Russian navy, whatever. Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)
      - AngryData 11mo ago
        Their is an entire DIY submarine community around the Caribbean and those guys aren't part of any navy or military and don't fly flags.
  - c45y 11mo ago
    Innocent until the courts say otherwise. It's why we apprehend people for crimes instead of just shooting them (in most countries)
  - metabagel 11mo ago
    Likely, a narco-sub, but still should intercept and board rather than summary execution.
slg 11mo ago
Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters that still wouldn't qualify for capital punishment if it was committed on US soil. It wouldn't matter if they provided mountains of evidence, it would still be wrong, and yet they are providing zero evidence. We're just openly committing war crimes knowing that no one can really stop it.
- gpm 11mo ago
  Is it war crimes when there's no war? Would actually be curious to learn if the answer is yes. Naively it seems like old fashioned murder without any special qualifier. I guess it could be both too?
  - bawolff 11mo ago
    War crimes require an armed conflict but not a "war". Note that declerations of war no longer really have meaning in international law and dont affect anything whether they are given or not. Armed conflict can be either international (e.g. between two countries) or non-international (e.g. you are atacking a non-state group. For example ISIS. However note that attacking a non-state group on the territory of a different state without permission of that state makes it be both.). War crimes apply to both types but the rules are slightly different between the two. Keep in mind also that people often colloquial use "war crimes" to mean any international crime, but technically its only one type. Crimes against humanity and genocide are technically not war crimes but a different category. They generally do not require an armed conflict (although often when they do happen its related to sone sort of armed conflict) Anyways this whole thing probably counts an armed conflict. I think at the least its a non-international armed conflict with the drug cartel. Attacking boats is usually an act of war even if they are in international waters, which might make it an international armed conflict with venuzula as well if the boats are connected to it (but the rules related to that im not really clear on and is a bit beyond my knoeledge). [IANAL]
    - nickff 11mo ago
      The possibility of this being an ‘act of war’ does seem very interesting, but I’m not sure Venezuela could claim it in this circumstance, as the vessels do not appear to be ‘flagged’. I would be interested to learn what the status of unflagged vessels is in international law, and I suspect there must be law on the subject, as pirates were typically unflagged.
Waterluvian 11mo ago
It’s not quite the same. It’s considerably more cowardly.
- lingrush4 11mo ago
  It's not cowardly at all because the person making the decision would not be putting themselves in danger either way. It's just pragmatic.
VladVladikoff 11mo ago
There is a non zero chance one of these strikes was a mistake and instead hit an innocent fishing boat. Because humans make mistakes all the damn time.
- harddrivereque 11mo ago
  Most of the released videos show speedboats without fishing equipment. For all intents and purposes, these speedboats might be medevac or just joyrides, but I would strongly count that they were fairly confidently related, to, uhm, the groups that were being referenced as being targeted officially. The sea allows for quite a bit more clearance regarding these things, mistakes can still happen, but are less likely than on densely populated areas on land. Anyways these strikes don't change the big picture in terms of movement of the things that they move - the things that they move comes in on airplanes, trucks, containers, through tunnels, in pockets of people arriving, even in fishing/leisure boats. For all I know they could be easily moving it using homing pigeons. And you can pass the pigeons through the gaps in the wall. Sure, not as efficient as by speedboats,but the demand will make stuff move. The solution to this problem is complex, but solving it in the society is easier than trying to stop the flow... I mean, people would just start producing locally then. Either with the groups of people that are being targeted or without.
  - nickff 11mo ago
    It seems as though part of the rationale may relate to ‘defunding’ the Venezuelan government (as the current administration seems to disfavor them), which appears to be deriving a significant amount of revenue (which may not be going to the treasury) from granting ‘license’ for these traffickers to operate from their coast.
b00ty4breakfast 11mo ago
this kind of stuff lines up with the US military MO going back to at least 2008, when more than a few civilian wedding parties in Afghanistan were hit by drone strikes (not the last wedding party in the region to be blown up during the Obama administration). We can say that perhaps we are regressing but it is not really a new development.
Stranger43 11mo ago
Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be. Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.
geoffmunn 11mo ago
Well luckily it turned out that they were all ne'er-do-wells so it's all good. Just like when the US used drones on Iraqi convoys and amazingly they were all Al-Qaeda sympathisers.
andrewinardeer 11mo ago
Droning people without public evidence is nothing new for any POTUS in the last 20 years.
symbogra 11mo ago
> It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood. That would work too but why risk american soldiers? This is much more efficient and the footage makes for good deterrent/propaganda.
- mrguyorama 11mo ago
  We have millions of years of human history that emphatically prove that "Chance of death" is not a deterrent You know what is? A high chance of any, even minimal punishment. Better life conditions.
fleroviumna 11mo ago
[dead]
lingrush4 11mo ago
No having the navy board the boats would be way worse because it would put US servicemen in danger. Bombing the boats from a safe distance is by far the best way to deal with this problem.
parsimo2010 11mo ago
I mean, if you don't watch the evening news or look for any evidence then I guess you wouldn't think there was public evidence. CBS Evening News has showed footage of the boats [1]. While this isn't ironclad proof (would you expect the drug runners to hold up identification showing them as criminals?), it is unlikely that these four-engined speed boats loaded with something is anything other than drugs. They are not boats full of people/refugees. They aren't cargo ships operated by a shipping company with any official records claiming to have been lost, or any legitimate tour company. The characteristics of these boats match many other drug trafficking boats that the US Coast Guard has intercepted in the past full of drugs. You can debate whether the US President has authority to order strikes like this but insinuating these might just be innocent people and not drug runners isn't going to go very far. [1] https://youtu.be/a2CQbRUEeWY?si=pPS_97LqIgCdLWix https://youtu.be/a2CQbRUEeWY?si=pPS_97LqIgCdLWix
gadders 11mo ago
It's the same as if Obama sent a drone to kill people in a foreign country, no?
blobbers 11mo ago
I think its an interesting conundrum because you're right it is the same as what you said! They don't tell us the due diligence they do, but we would hope that our bureaucracy is careful about who they target and carefully thinks about how it affects the perception of americans vs. the potential benefit to our society (elimination of narco traffickers)? Ukraine / Russia aside, we no longer have much in the way of conventional wars where each team wears a certain color and they shoot at each other. Instead the weaker force tries to disguise itself as best possible and strike when possible. In this case, a drug cartel would try to be as under the radar as possible. What level of due diligence would you need to see before you would trust that a strike is justified? Or is the problem that narco trafficking doesn't justify death and therefore they should simply be imprisoning traffickers? On the subject of evidence, the problem with AI is that now video and imagery can easily be faked. You've always been able to plant a bag of weed on a teenager and arrest him, so planting a kilo of coke on a boat and arresting someone is no different. Malaysia, Philippines, China, Singapore all punish drug related crimes with death. One could argue that the societal impact of drugs is incredibly bad, thus warranting death to the traffickers. Without a doubt, helping addicts is a societally very challenging problem! Anyone who has had a loved one fall victim to addiction has dealt with the struggle of emotions that comes with it. A need for them to be better, but lacking the path forward when they regress. Simply removing the drugs from the equation would have never destroyed their lives. At some point it fundamentally needs to come down to trusting the people who defend the country ... who are entrusted to do this most difficult job.

by davidw 11mo ago

"narco-trafficking boats" There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.

wetpaws 11mo ago

[dead]

voganmother42 11mo ago

The US gov cartel is ruthless - military members get to be murderers, but its good preparation for when they are deployed against US cities

somenameforme 11mo ago

100% agreed with this and this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.' All of this really sounds so much better than what it really is. It's murdering people all around the world, many of whom are 100% innocent. For instance the last person we droned in occupied Afghanistan was Zemari Ahmadi - a longtime worker for a US humanitarian aid organization. A US drone operator mistook bottles of water he was loading into his car for his family as bombs, and so they murdered him as well as 10 other civilians, including 7 children, all with the press of a button. [1] [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-drone-kabul-afghanistan-isis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/world/asia/us-air-strike-...

jmb99 11mo ago
>many of whom are 100% innocent Under US law, 100% of them are 100% innocent, by definition. "Innocent until proven guilty" and whatnot; it literally means that every person is innocent in the eyes of the law until a court finds them guilty.
- PenguinCoder 11mo ago
  Unfortunately that had been forgotten in this era.
- anarticle 11mo ago
  Fun fact, if you're not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply. I'm not saying this because I'm taking a side, but this was how the Patriot act had knock on effects. An interesting case of this is something like you call a foreign national in another country and this is enough to be able to tap both sides of the conversation via Patriot Act / NSA purview.
  - asdefghyk 11mo ago
    RE ".....not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply....." Does not maKE SENSE... Why are people extradited to US from overseas locations . Like why they want Julian Assange ?
    - raspasov 11mo ago
      Just some ideas: - Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media - He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy) - He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise. For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
    - bulbar 11mo ago
      It does not apply in general, but a country will always declare jurisdiction if deemed necessary. A common example in Germany is that the country will try to enforce German law for foreign-hosted websites hosted by citizen of another country if the website is targeted at German citizen.
  - 11mo ago
owlbite 11mo ago
But it can be even worse than that. It's "we assassinated the phone", "algorithm says vehicle has suspicious travel history and must die". There's no real thinking human in the loop for some of this stuff, just some model decided the metadata has a high probability of being associate with an opponent of some flavor and then everyone in the vicinity is blown to bits as computer said kill.
mmooss 11mo ago
> this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.' The US administration uses the long range to argue that the War Powers Act doesn't apply: They aruge that the Act applies to 'hostilities', and US soldiers are too far from the targets to be exposed to danger, therefore they aren't 'hostilities'.
- lupire 11mo ago
  And that reasoning was plagiarized from Obama's justification for operations in Libya.
  - mmooss 11mo ago
    Was it? And so what?
hpdigidrifter 11mo ago
>100% innocent Feel free to explain the submarine with no flag they bombed
- vincnetas 11mo ago
  i have not seen any submarines with flags though.
  - dmoy 11mo ago
    I think GP means flag as in flag state - ocean vessels are typically to some country. In this sense, nearly all submarines are flagged - US navy, Russian navy, whatever. Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)
    - AngryData 11mo ago
      Their is an entire DIY submarine community around the Caribbean and those guys aren't part of any navy or military and don't fly flags.
- c45y 11mo ago
  Innocent until the courts say otherwise. It's why we apprehend people for crimes instead of just shooting them (in most countries)
- metabagel 11mo ago
  Likely, a narco-sub, but still should intercept and board rather than summary execution.

slg 11mo ago

Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters that still wouldn't qualify for capital punishment if it was committed on US soil. It wouldn't matter if they provided mountains of evidence, it would still be wrong, and yet they are providing zero evidence. We're just openly committing war crimes knowing that no one can really stop it.

gpm 11mo ago
Is it war crimes when there's no war? Would actually be curious to learn if the answer is yes. Naively it seems like old fashioned murder without any special qualifier. I guess it could be both too?
- bawolff 11mo ago
  War crimes require an armed conflict but not a "war". Note that declerations of war no longer really have meaning in international law and dont affect anything whether they are given or not. Armed conflict can be either international (e.g. between two countries) or non-international (e.g. you are atacking a non-state group. For example ISIS. However note that attacking a non-state group on the territory of a different state without permission of that state makes it be both.). War crimes apply to both types but the rules are slightly different between the two. Keep in mind also that people often colloquial use "war crimes" to mean any international crime, but technically its only one type. Crimes against humanity and genocide are technically not war crimes but a different category. They generally do not require an armed conflict (although often when they do happen its related to sone sort of armed conflict) Anyways this whole thing probably counts an armed conflict. I think at the least its a non-international armed conflict with the drug cartel. Attacking boats is usually an act of war even if they are in international waters, which might make it an international armed conflict with venuzula as well if the boats are connected to it (but the rules related to that im not really clear on and is a bit beyond my knoeledge). [IANAL]
  - nickff 11mo ago
    The possibility of this being an ‘act of war’ does seem very interesting, but I’m not sure Venezuela could claim it in this circumstance, as the vessels do not appear to be ‘flagged’. I would be interested to learn what the status of unflagged vessels is in international law, and I suspect there must be law on the subject, as pirates were typically unflagged.

Waterluvian 11mo ago

It’s not quite the same. It’s considerably more cowardly.

lingrush4 11mo ago
It's not cowardly at all because the person making the decision would not be putting themselves in danger either way. It's just pragmatic.

VladVladikoff 11mo ago

There is a non zero chance one of these strikes was a mistake and instead hit an innocent fishing boat. Because humans make mistakes all the damn time.

harddrivereque 11mo ago
Most of the released videos show speedboats without fishing equipment. For all intents and purposes, these speedboats might be medevac or just joyrides, but I would strongly count that they were fairly confidently related, to, uhm, the groups that were being referenced as being targeted officially. The sea allows for quite a bit more clearance regarding these things, mistakes can still happen, but are less likely than on densely populated areas on land. Anyways these strikes don't change the big picture in terms of movement of the things that they move - the things that they move comes in on airplanes, trucks, containers, through tunnels, in pockets of people arriving, even in fishing/leisure boats. For all I know they could be easily moving it using homing pigeons. And you can pass the pigeons through the gaps in the wall. Sure, not as efficient as by speedboats,but the demand will make stuff move. The solution to this problem is complex, but solving it in the society is easier than trying to stop the flow... I mean, people would just start producing locally then. Either with the groups of people that are being targeted or without.
- nickff 11mo ago
  It seems as though part of the rationale may relate to ‘defunding’ the Venezuelan government (as the current administration seems to disfavor them), which appears to be deriving a significant amount of revenue (which may not be going to the treasury) from granting ‘license’ for these traffickers to operate from their coast.

b00ty4breakfast 11mo ago

this kind of stuff lines up with the US military MO going back to at least 2008, when more than a few civilian wedding parties in Afghanistan were hit by drone strikes (not the last wedding party in the region to be blown up during the Obama administration). We can say that perhaps we are regressing but it is not really a new development.

Stranger43 11mo ago

Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be. Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.

geoffmunn 11mo ago

Well luckily it turned out that they were all ne'er-do-wells so it's all good. Just like when the US used drones on Iraqi convoys and amazingly they were all Al-Qaeda sympathisers.

andrewinardeer 11mo ago

Droning people without public evidence is nothing new for any POTUS in the last 20 years.

symbogra 11mo ago

> It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood. That would work too but why risk american soldiers? This is much more efficient and the footage makes for good deterrent/propaganda.

mrguyorama 11mo ago
We have millions of years of human history that emphatically prove that "Chance of death" is not a deterrent You know what is? A high chance of any, even minimal punishment. Better life conditions.

fleroviumna 11mo ago

[dead]

lingrush4 11mo ago

No having the navy board the boats would be way worse because it would put US servicemen in danger. Bombing the boats from a safe distance is by far the best way to deal with this problem.

parsimo2010 11mo ago

I mean, if you don't watch the evening news or look for any evidence then I guess you wouldn't think there was public evidence. CBS Evening News has showed footage of the boats [1]. While this isn't ironclad proof (would you expect the drug runners to hold up identification showing them as criminals?), it is unlikely that these four-engined speed boats loaded with something is anything other than drugs. They are not boats full of people/refugees. They aren't cargo ships operated by a shipping company with any official records claiming to have been lost, or any legitimate tour company. The characteristics of these boats match many other drug trafficking boats that the US Coast Guard has intercepted in the past full of drugs. You can debate whether the US President has authority to order strikes like this but insinuating these might just be innocent people and not drug runners isn't going to go very far. [1] https://youtu.be/a2CQbRUEeWY?si=pPS_97LqIgCdLWix https://youtu.be/a2CQbRUEeWY?si=pPS_97LqIgCdLWix

gadders 11mo ago

It's the same as if Obama sent a drone to kill people in a foreign country, no?

blobbers 11mo ago

I think its an interesting conundrum because you're right it is the same as what you said! They don't tell us the due diligence they do, but we would hope that our bureaucracy is careful about who they target and carefully thinks about how it affects the perception of americans vs. the potential benefit to our society (elimination of narco traffickers)? Ukraine / Russia aside, we no longer have much in the way of conventional wars where each team wears a certain color and they shoot at each other. Instead the weaker force tries to disguise itself as best possible and strike when possible. In this case, a drug cartel would try to be as under the radar as possible. What level of due diligence would you need to see before you would trust that a strike is justified? Or is the problem that narco trafficking doesn't justify death and therefore they should simply be imprisoning traffickers? On the subject of evidence, the problem with AI is that now video and imagery can easily be faked. You've always been able to plant a bag of weed on a teenager and arrest him, so planting a kilo of coke on a boat and arresting someone is no different. Malaysia, Philippines, China, Singapore all punish drug related crimes with death. One could argue that the societal impact of drugs is incredibly bad, thus warranting death to the traffickers. Without a doubt, helping addicts is a societally very challenging problem! Anyone who has had a loved one fall victim to addiction has dealt with the struggle of emotions that comes with it. A need for them to be better, but lacking the path forward when they regress. Simply removing the drugs from the equation would have never destroyed their lives. At some point it fundamentally needs to come down to trusting the people who defend the country ... who are entrusted to do this most difficult job.